It’s already summer where I live. The days are bright and sunny by 6:30 AM and just pure hot by afternoon. There’s no way I want to heat up the kitchen by cooking dinner, nor do I want to wait until after the sun goes down to eat, so I get the hubby to fire up the grill! He loves it, makes him feel important or something.

I can understand why others feel the same way and fire up their BBQ grills. It’s just too hot to be baking or having any sort of heat producing fire in the house when the temperature is 96-100 degrees outside. Besides, the smell of a corn on the cob and BBQ chicken grilling usually gets the salivary glands stimulated.

What I don’t comprehend is the ignorance of my neighbors using their grills inside the garage! That’s crazy, just plain crazy. They have the garage door open wide as they sit in their lawn chairs watching the traffic go by. Some of them even have a working big screen TV in the garage and several people waiting for dinner to cook. Maybe it’s the “boys room,” but that still doesn’t make sense to me.

One of the first rules to using a grill is to be able to control the fire, and that includes the smoke. It doesn’t matter whether you use a charcoal grill, gas grill, or wood-burning smoker; the potential for a fire still exists. Proper ventilation is a must. It cannot be controlled inside the garage. For heavens sake, with the lighter fluid can sitting close by or the furniture, rags, newspapers or other flammable substances, it just isn’t safe. The smarter idea would be to set the grill just outside the garage. It would be close for them to check periodically, but not creating a potentially hazardous situation.

Every time I drive down the street and see their garage door open, I have to wonder when the fire engine will be parked in front of their house. I just don’t understand their reasoning behind grilling in the garage. I can’t imagine the smell of all the smoke entering the house. No wonder they sit in the garage.

Worse yet is the smell of too much lighter fluid burning on the charcoal. Some of the neighbors use half the can of lighter fluid to get their fire cooking! The smell permeates the air of the surrounding homes and sometimes enters through the swamp coolers or air conditioning units. It wouldn’t be so horrible if it only lasted a few minutes, but these arsonists can’t control the heat of their fires, so they douse the charcoal with more as they cook!

Like I said, I can appreciate the savory flavor of BBQ meat cooking on the grill, but not the ignorance of grilling in the garage.

To help you get started, here's a basic BBQ recipe using Tomato Sauce

1 cn tomato sauce,1 small cn tomato paste, 2 tblspns vinegar,
2 tblsps olive oil, 3 tblsps brown sugar, a dash of honey, 3 crushed cloves garlic,
4 tblspns minced onion, 1 tblspn Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp dry mustard
Add ground pepper for taste